We may never make any of their recipes, but reading them and the personal notes that accompany them allows us to peek into their cooking pots and imagine the lives that surround them. For the writer in me, community cookbooks shout character and setting. For the historian in me, the recipes chronicle decades and trends. For the cook in me, it's an endless curiousity about the role food plays in our lives and shapes our collective and individual histories. It's also about what I would and would not cook, and the reactions of my husband and family if I were to actually serve Liver Casserole or Dutch Mess.
Who's Cooking What In Illinois is my first, true armchair book in that it has all those elements. I no longer remember where I got this gem, but it's truly in a class by itself when it comes to armchair cookery. The book bears the character and identity of all those homegrown community spiral cookbooks that armchair cooks love, but is actually a hard cover edition from a New York publisher.
My friend Patty also had this cookbook, and between the two of us, we cooked a lot its recipes. It is her I think of each time I see this book. Patty and I met when we were new teachers in a middle school. Jack, her husband, was a fulltime student and commuted each day into the city to his law school. My husband, also a fulltime student, was taking classes for his education degree and drove an hour each day to his university. So, new teachers, husbands in school, commuting expenses ... it all added up to no money. We spent a lot of time with each other, sometimes going out to dinner on those long-awaited pay days, but also at our apartments. Cheap beer, wine and chips and dip were part of the socializing, but it often included another recipe that Patty or I had made as well.
Patty was of Norwegian heritage and from Minnesota. It was from her that I first heard the term 'hot dish,' as in 'tuna hot dish.' She was a much more accomplished cook than me; her movements in the kitchen, so quick and efficient, contrasted with my more deliberate approach. For potato salad, she boiled reds with their skins on and then just slipped them off. I laboriously peeled each one, ridding it of every speck of eye and skin. And she made lefse, something I had never heard of, or eaten, until I sampled hers. Even then, my preferred baking recipes were of the throw-everything-in-one-bowl genre. Once she told me how much she loved Circus Peanuts, something else unknown to me. When I saw a recipe for Circus Peanut Salad in Who's Cooking What in Illinois, I had to make it for her. Once I got past the amount of sugar in that recipe, and the fact that it had absolutely nothing in common with any "salad" I hate ever eaten or made, I was able to marvel at the palest orange hue I'd ever seen and appreciate the ingenuity and creativity behind it. I saw the cook who saw the open bag of Circus Peanuts her kids had been eating and decided that rather than having them go to waste, she'd make a "salad" with it.
Recipes for traditional Midwestern fare which I had never eaten filled the book. While a separate chapter features "Casseroles," it could be argued that the entire book is nothing more than a repository of Casserole Recipes Served In Illinois. Here's where I first encountered that potluck favorite, Broccoli Rice Casserole, a creamy concoction held together by processed cheese product. I also found Taco Salad, another backyard barbecue and potluck favorite that I still love today. I tried Char's Coleslaw. Sherbet-Gelatin Salad. Pineapple Timbale. Lots of cakes, bars and puddings. Peanut Butter Granola. And of course prepared many dinners : Applesauce Meatballs (still one of my favorites). Fried Fish in Batter. Meal in a Dish. Dutch Meat Loaf. Beef and Potato Loaf. I attempted yeast again with Easy Whole Wheat Rolls.
While I found plenty to choose from in this cookbook, plenty annoyed me as well. I was used to the orderly and thoroughly edited pages of Betty Crocker and Good Housekeeping as well as Soupcon from the Chicago Junior League. True, It's A Daisy needed an edit, but it was such a slim, charming work that I could deal with it. But this. This 456-pager challenged every bit of the English major and writer in me. Haphazard categorization of the recipes still grates on me, making it difficult to find recipes, as there appears to be no reason or logic for its many categories and subcategories.
This means that the only workable approach to this book is a serendipitious one ... which is what being an Armchair Cook is all about. All of the recipes in this book come from real people, with real kitchens and real families for whom they cook. Recipes bear the stamp of a cook's creativity and frugality in making do with what she had while still feeding her family nourishing meals.
One charming feature is that each recipe includes the cook's hometown. Illinois is a big state, and those of us in the Metro area are blithely ignorant of the geography that extends beyond the rings of suburbia. Dozens of towns dot the Downstate lanscape, places I'd never heard of. Chenoa. Ipava. Brimfield. Anna. Bement. Mechanicsburg. Franklin Grove. At one time the town I grew up in was an unheard of. My parents built a house in the tiny town of Bartlett, about 35 miles west of Chicago, and left the city when I was six months old. The population numbered in the hundreds and had a four-room school with a basement that housed two more grades. We walked to and from school, even though it was on the other side of town, and came home for lunch each day. My mother drove into a nearby city for groceries.
Bartlett eventually grew and achieved suburban status. When I return, trying to discern the original town is like looking at one of those pictures where images are hidden in the bigger scene. I become Waldo, lost in the homogenous suburbian stamp which hides all the familiar places. Where's Earl's, the sundry and candy shop with the marbled-counter fountain in the back, and the single table with the bright red vinyl padded chairs? Or The Eck? On rare Friday nights, my father brought dinner home for us (fish fries for him and my mother, cheeseburgers for us), carried out on thick white paper plates, two dinners stacked per brown paper bag. I can't help but wonder at the fate of the dozens of towns listed in my book. Did Depue and Hutsonville and Moro fade away? Is someone still serving Pickled Carrots in Beardstown, or Royal Round Steak in Fults? Or did they go the way of Bartlett where the old retreated so it could be pumped up with new houses, new streets and new strip malls? Such are questions which armchair cooks ponder.
Recipe titles in this book meet the highest standards of armchair cookery, as they must rise above label status. Colorful and whimsical names top some, like Shipwreck. Sailboats. Kram. Mud Hen Bars. And, one of my favorites, It's A Mess (the cook's note says "Don't expect leftovers from this dish!").
Others preserve a bit of history and provide a window into another time and place. Hard Times Pudding. Icebox Potato Rolls. Scrapple. Red Beet Jelly. Honey Tripe. Butter Bean Gravy. Molded Chef's Gelatin.
Heritage speaks loudly on the pages of this book. Croatian Sauerkraut. Bohemian Houska. Sjomansbiff. Orehava Potica. Kaputsa.
I found a recipe for Russian Fluff, a dish a newly-married friend from high school proudly prepared for me when I was on a visit home from college. Ground chuck mingled with green pepper, onions, canned peas and rice, all bound together with cream of tomato soup. She gave me the recipe, and I'm absolutely positive this was the first time someone shared a recipe with me. It really didn't require cooking, just mixing, so it was among the first dishes I prepared when I started cooking after college. (It didn't last long in the rotation, however.)
Many of the recipes in Who's Cooking What could be considered heirloom recipes whose titles bear no resemblance to what we would expect from such a recipe today. Consider Stuffed Mangos. Today, that could be quite trendy, one we might encounter on the pages of Bon Appetit or on the plate at an upscale restaurant. But for a cook in Altamount, it's a recipe brought to America by his ancestors and taught to each succeeding generation, a family favorite that takes days to prepare. The recipe involves heaping cabbage cut like sauerkraut into a dishpan, later packing it all into a stone jar, weighing mangos down with an upside down plate and heavy stone, preparing a pickling solution, and eventually processing in sterilized jars. The cook promises that they're an attractive addition to a relish tray.
Who makes any of these recipes now? No one I know, yet I'm comforted to know the recipes exist, that real people prepared them, and that there are probably still cooks who do.
Grandma recipes could be a separate category in this cookbook, for they fill its pages. It's silly, I know, but I've always had a curious fascination for Grandma recipes, probably because none exist in my family. My father spoke little about his German-born parents, but he once told me his mother had been an excellent cook. She immigrated from Germany and spent time in England where she supervised the staff at a castle. After coming to America, she and my grandfather ran a small corner grocery store in Chicago. She died before my parents married.My maternal grandmother wasn't really a part of our lives. I have one memory of briefly visiting her at her apartment on Sheffield, near Wrigley Field, but no cooking was going on. In another memory, she stands in our kitchen, wearing a hat and one of those fur stoles adorned with a dead animal head and tiny claws. She had taken the train out to see us on a Thanksgiving. I see her smiling, drinking a Tom and Jerry from a white, to-go cup she picked up at the bar across the street from the train station before coming to our house. I thought it was hot chocolate, but she wouldn't let me have a sip. So no cooking on that occasion, either.
In Who's Cooking What In Illinois, I find Grandma's Cornmeal Salmon Croquettes. Grandma's Eggnog. Grandma Porter's Butterscotch Pie. Grandma's Surprise. Grandma's Polish Nut Roll. Grandma Belin's Fudge. Grandma Warren's Cream Pie. Mother Dunne's Irish Soda Bread (I'm sure she was the Grandma). I decided early on that I want to be a grandmother who cooks and bakes and spends time with her grandchildren, just because. As I've gotten older, I no longer see that as something I can decide. If it happens, it will truly be a gift, because it will mean that one, I have been blessed with grandchildren; two, my children and grandchildren have a strong enough bond with me that they will want to spend time with me; and three, that I will have my wits about me and the ability to actually still cook. With them and for them.
One recipe in particular remains a favorite: Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak. I tried all sorts of the barbecue beef recipes in the book, but this one was the best. I remember inviting Patty and Jack over and preparing this dinner. It was my husband's last year of school, and we could no longer afford our apartment, so we moved into the Bartlett house with my dad. When we were growing up, the basement had been finished with cedar paneling, a tiled floor, and a drop ceiling. The fire place was almost always going and for sure cancelled out any dampness. A state-of-the-art stereo system housed in an upstairs room piped in music from two speakers placed at either end of the basement. With a built-in bar and pool table, it became the hub of hanging out and entertaining. Here is where we had our dinner with Jack and Patty. With it, I served thick slices of rye bread, which my father bought at the Augustana Bakery in the city and brought home for freezing. I loved that rye bread. He would slice off a hunk and dip it in his black coffee and eat it while he read the Chicago Tribune at the dining room table. For my dinner that night, it would be the perfect foil to the fall-apart, tender meat and its sweet, mild sauce.
We had a leisurely dinner that night, the four of us sitting long after we had finished eating, talking against the soundtracks of music and the crackling of the fire. Looking back, I see four young people in their 20s, married, no children, and so much ahead of them.
What none of us knew then was that Jack, a Vietnam vet who had been exposed to Agent Orange, would not make it very far into that future. He earned his law degree, joined a practice, and he and Patty bought their first house. It was a ridiculous time to buy a house, that being the Carter era where interest rates hovered near 17 percent. But everyone hungered for home ownership then, so that's what people did. Then they had two babies.
We, too, had bought our first house, the childhood home of an older woman who lived down the street and who likely wondered at the way a neighborhood had grown up around their old farmhouse. We brought three daughters home to that house. Our youngest was barely six weeks old when we went to Jack's funeral. He fought hard, even undertaking an experimental treatment, but it was not to be. Our lives had been moving in different directions at the time of his death, and continued to do so over the years. Patty raised her two children and is now principal of a large suburban high school.
Serendipity touched me again on a day not too long ago when one of my high school students came up to me after class and told me that his aunt was my friend Patty. It gave me pause, and took me back to a time I hadn't thought about in a long while.
I saw those four twentysomethings again, eating Patty's Chicken Quiche at one of those brunches we all loved and planned from time to time, and just sitting on a summer night on the back porch that hung over the alley in their second floor apartment. The street lamp illuminated the four of us, probably quite harshly, but if I didn't look directly at it, it felt just like moonlight. In the next second, I thought, Yes, it is a small world, after all. We never really lose the people who touch us; they come back to us again and again, in ways we noticed and probably ways we don't.
Here is the recipe for Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak that I made that long ago night for the four of us. Bake and serve this in your oldest Corningware casserole dish. The Augustana Bakery is no longer around, but I suggest you find a good German bakery and get some sturdy rye bread to go with this. The leftovers will be great to eat tomorow, either with some butter or dunked in coffee, if that is to your liking.
Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak
1-1/2 lbs. round steak
2 T. salad oil
1/2 c. chopped onions
3/4 c. catsup
1/2 c. vinegar
3/4 c. water
1 T. mustard
1 T. brown sugar
1 t. Worcestershire sauce
1 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
Brown steak in 1 t. oil. In a saucepan, simmer for 5 minutes--1 tablespoon oil, onions, catsup, vinegar, water, mustard, brown sugar, and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over steak. Bake in a covered dish at 350 degrees for 1-1/2 hours. Serve with baked potatoes and salad.
